Communications satellites operating in Earth orbit were first seriously proposed during the middle of this century. A relatively small portion of current telephone traffic is relayed between ground stations by spacecraft carrying transponders that are located over a fixed position on the Earth in 22,300 mile geosynchronous orbits. Over the past few decades, public phone systems have relied primarily on land lines and microwave repeaters to handle call traffic. Cellular networks now provide service which extends previous network capabilities. Customers using hand-held portable phones or carphones are now able to access the conventional, centralized land-based system without using a traditional fixed phone, as long as their transportable terminals are within the range of land-based antenna towers called "cell sites." Even in the United States, these cell sites are not universally prevalent, since market forces restrict cellular service to only the most densely populated urban portions of our country. Since cellular service is available to only a small minority of privileged users in wealthy countries, and is virtually non-existent in lesser developed parts of the world, the operators of traditional phone networks are confronted with serious systemic problems that severely constrain the continued growth of their communications utilities.
No system that is currently available to the general public is capable of taking advantage of the enormous augmentation of communications capacity that could be achieved if the traditional centralized grid of terrestrial switches, wires, fibers, and microwave repeaters could be completely bypassed. Public phone companies are not presently able to sell continuous global service to their customers who wish to use phones that are not hard-wired to the land-based network. Some commercial spacecraft now in service help to relay some portion of the total call traffic, but all these calls must still pass through the conventional land-based system. The problem of providing an economically feasible network for voice, data, and video which can be used by subscribers all over the world has presented a major challenge to the communications business. The development of a constellation of reliable, high-gain satellites which can communicate directly to terrestrial terminals without routing calls through land-based networks would constitute a major technological advance and would satisfy a long felt need within the electronics and telephone industries.